Wow, reduced rent. Yeah.
This is a good way to keep those displaced people and kids of displaced people poor for more generations…
Rent assistance is just a good way of keeping poor people poor. Sorry. Rent is helping keep these people poor. Rent is what causes the problems of gentrification - if the people who lived in those neighborhoods were allowed to be invested in those neighborhoods, the rising tide would help them, not drown them.
Santa Monica needs to be finding these people housing, giving them a good down payment and a guaranteed loan, and doing everything that they can to work with them to get them into home ownership. It’s what they are owed.
Honestly, the older I am getting, the more I am thinking that the fairest thing and the best thing to do would be to go in and condemn whole swaths of poor neighborhood and buy them from the landlords at roughly market rates, turn around and sell them (basically, everyone gets a loan, and they own the house after 10 years or something like that) to the people who are renting them, train people from the neighborhood in construction and repair, pay them and subsidize repairs to get those homes up to code. People need roots, people need stability, and it turns out that rent is really, really bad for a lot of people and it has caused generations of problems due to redlining and discrimination, and it’s time to fix it.
Everyone who wants to own a home should be able to buy a home.
